“Good Morning, I’m James Grigsby, coming to you live from an undisclosed location with a special morning edition of Frontline New York. It is 8 AM on the East Coast and the sun has risen on a country in ruins, dismay… and loss. In a shocking turn of events, Mayor Manning and Police Commissioner Sumption have ordered all police assets to stand down and by all counts they have given in to the demands of the Augments that have laid siege to our city. This coincides with the orders that Governor Brower issued as of 6 AM this morning, turning over the state to a larger group that have called themselves, Axio’s Generals. Due to an increase in regulations and control around network and radio usage, we here at Frontline New York are p-p-p-proud to be able to promise that we will continue bringing you updates that you need to know without delay. ”

  The man sitting behind the desk did not look camera ready.

  This may have been because, instead of the normal custom-made, designer suits that he always wore, James Grigsby was instead in a wrinkled t-shirt, his hair a complete mess and bags evident under his eyes that screamed of a lack of any sort of makeup. It may have even been due to the fact that he, along with a small group of his staff, had been abducted early on into the siege of New York City, bags shoved over their heads and forced into the back of a vehicle as metal scales came raining down from the sky. Or it may just have been because James, who had grown accustomed to his overpriced and luxurious mattress, had been forced to sleep on what could barely be called a decorative cushion in a desolate, almost maliciously inhospitable concrete room.

  Even if all of that hadn’t happened, James doubted that he would have been able to look perfect for the camera as he was forced to read off of a teleprompter with several large, robotic figures standing just off camera with their weapons leveled directly at him.

  “In an attempt to prove that this change of leadership will not prevent usual courses of business, o- o- our new leader… Clockwork Tyrant, has deployed the vast forces of his Clockwork Droids to repair the damage done during the transition of power. All roads leading out of the city have been shut down, pending negotiations with the newly formed independent regions across the United States.”

  There was footage that took over the channel, showing footage from different cities, from different areas of the world where destruction ranged from almost nothing, to entire buildings, blocks and in one case an entire city, had been completely leveled.

  “Across the country… across the planet… many of us want to know… where is The First? Where is his team? Why has he aband-”

  A fist smashed into the television, sending it backwards into the wall behind it and breaking it apart, effectively silencing the disheveled anchor as Christopher stood over the destroyed electronic with his teeth grit harshly together. His hand hurt from the punch, something that had become foreign to him over the years and he slowly flexed his hand as small droplets of blood began to run down his fingers.

  Calypso didn’t say anything as he stood there, staring down at the television and working to catch his breath. Instead she sat on the couch, holding a pillow in her lap as she watched him carefully.

  As much as she had wished there was something that she could have done herself, her missions over the last few days had drawn her further and further from the Americas and now it became painfully evident as to why. Without their bases set up across the United States, they had no way to quickly get into the action, and with these attacks so clearly premeditated by Axio, he had been able to play the entire system like a fiddle.

  Christopher’s breaths were coming out in short, rapid bursts as his teeth ground side-to-side and just as Calypso was going to ask if he was okay, he leaned his head back out and let out what she could only describe as a scream of pure frustration. Calypso knew exactly how easy it was to end up blaming herself when things went wrong, especially with how everything had started, but she knew it was close to nothing compared to the weight of the world that Christopher seemed to carry around with him.

  “You can’t blame yourself for this… you couldn’t have-”

  “Cassie… I love you… but stop,” Christopher interrupted her, holding up a hand as he slowly calmed himself down. “Every last bit of this is my fault. It doesn’t matter if you want to blame me as me… or blame me for giving up my power… this is my fault…”

  Calypso slowly stood up, walking over to him and placing her hands on his shoulders. She could feel the tension rolling off of him and she briefly wished that her power was accessible in this area, if only to ease his worries. But even then, she wasn’t sure what that would do. The chaos was widespread, and Christopher always did work better when he was under a mountain's worth of stress. It might not have been sustainable without his formerly super level of endurance, but it was quite literally out of her power to actually make him slow down.

  “What do we have to do?” She asked and he looked back over his shoulder at her.

  “I… I don’t know…” Christopher admitted before he looked back toward his computer console. “This is so far beyond the scope of what I thought Axio would do… of what he could do even without the Key…”

  “Couldn’t you just… I don’t know… reuse it and reset things?” Calypso asked as Christopher reached up, patting one of her hands before he slowly wandered toward his desk chair.

  “No… Even if I could do it easily, I just can’t risk opening the code back up. The last time I did, Axio completely rewrote the rules of the game. Hell… I thought I knew what he had changed but the only way all of these guys can be out there is if Axio had taken over the control and defense systems for the Miscreant Holding Centers,” he said, dropping into the chair and looking toward the ground.

  His hair and beard had continued to grow in his seclusion, not that he actually needed it to keep his identity a secret, but the longer it went on, the more disheveled the normally clean cut man became.

  “I… Look Christopher… I’ve held my tongue because you asked me to trust you… and I do, but I need to know why you had to use it in the first place, what was it about him?”

  He looked over toward his monitors, one entire computer dedicated literally just to tracking Loophole and his actions before turning back to Calypso and shaking his head.

  “Him… nothing…” Christopher admitted. “He was just in the wrong place and the wrong time… or maybe it was the right place… I guess it really depends on his point of view. I just… I had reached my limit Cassie… He was one guy… one guy who just happened to be in the way and Firefist was going to kill him. I couldn’t get him to a hospital in time because of the damage… it was just… it was the only way to keep him alive. There was something about it that just finally pushed me up and over the edge and I just... reacted. Before I knew it the Key was activated and everything was in motion.”

  Cassie stared at him, trying to see past his unreadable expression. The two of them had known each other for a long time at this point and their relationship had gone through a myriad of different stages. From friends and colleagues, to partners and even lovers, but even through all of that she had never been able to fully tear past all of the shields he had put up. He still had secrets that he deemed too much to disclose.

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  “I think… I think it’s time we called Pierre and Hikari.”

  Christopher’s head shifted and his eyes hardened as he looked at her, taking a moment to think before he nodded.

  “You know they’re going to ask a lot more questions than you do… right?” He said and Calypso gave him a wry smile.

  “Oh, I’m counting on it, you might dodge my questions because you know I’ll let you get away with it, but Hikari won’t put up with that.”

  “Okay… call the team and get them here as soon as you can.”

  *****

  “You have had backdoor access to the code this entire time!? And you chose to keep it a secret? Christopher-san, do you realize just what ruination could come from that?”

  “It was a most unwise decision, I agree mon ami, but there is naught that can be done to change the past, only help the future, oui?”

  The room that normally looked like a large man-cave had reshaped in the hour it took for Calypso to wrangle both Mandragos and Brightburst. The two of them were sitting next to each other in mismatched chairs around a dining room table that was placed at the center of the room where the large sofa and coffee table had normally been placed. Brightburst was seated bolt upright, her hands clenched together atop the table next to a steaming cup of tea that Christopher had made sure to have prepared while Mandragos sat back in his own chair with a slightly more casual lean.

  Their local governments had gone into a panic, trying to broker deals with them and other Augments in their areas to provide more sweeping protections from the horrors that had happened in what had quickly become referred to as the Assaulted Americas. Of course, being two of the small group of First Wave Augments in the world meant that both of them, while not nearly as powerful as The First, had more than enough power to spare on their own. While they might not have been able to cross the planet in the blink of an eye, they could protect their own homes with justified furiosity.

  “Well there must be something that can be done of it, or else why would we have finally been called up?” Brightburst asked, looking over toward Mandragos before turning her attention across the table to Calypso and Christopher, who looked rather out of place amongst the brightly colored costumes of the others seated with him. “Why have you not used this “Administration Key” to simply erase Axio’s presence from the system, would that not be the correct solution?”

  Christopher’s eyes fell to the table. He knew he couldn’t keep this a secret any longer and the three people in the room may have been the most trustworthy people that he knew, but trustworthiness only went so far. As members of the First Wave, they didn’t have an Acceptance Matrix but each of them did have a Personal A.I. and while Chris was relatively sure that theirs were disconnected from Axio’s thrall, it was still a risk to let this specific bit of knowledge out and into the world.

  “There’s a few reasons why I can’t just delete him, the least of which is just how integral his existence is into the system itself. I can’t access the Key without leaving this space because of where I had to hide it. These dead zones… they weren’t possibly back when everything first started… It took the code mishap with The Common Ground upstairs before Andrew learned how to use that technique to create our own areas. That was back before I realized he was trying to weaponize the Augmentation process, but it didn't change that until they were created, it was basically impossible for me to find a place to hide it that Axio wouldn’t have been able to find himself. It took the integration of the P.A.I. system before I finally had a solution.”

  “Oh? And where exactly did you put this little secret of yours?” Mandragos asked, finally sitting up and resting his elbows on the table.

  Christopher hesitated briefly, looking over and meeting eyes with Calypso before he resolved himself. “It was originally on Axio. See… he’s technically my P.A.I., which gives me a bit more access to his system than I think he ever really realized. When the system was developed, I discovered that the A.I.s, as smart as they were, couldn’t look at their own code, and that extended to other A.I.s as well. It was some sort of defense mechanism to stop them from accidentally changing themselves or each other maliciously. I’m not sure where Axio came from, but that was something he let slip early on in our time together… so, seeing it as a bit of a safety net, I attached the Administration Key directly to him just in case I ever needed unlimited access to make modifications.”

  “Which explains why all of those news reports coming in have been rather insistent on asking the question as to where you have disappeared to, yes? You have shut this Key off and Axio thinks that by finding you, he can regain access to it?” Brightburst asked, tapping her fingers together.

  “I think he believes that, yes,” Christopher nodded, though a small smile did finally touch the corners of his lips. “But… It wouldn’t do him any good… I’m not The First any more… I gave that name up when I added Loophole into the Tenth Wave. The game is designed and set up to only allow in a certain number of people each year. I'm still not exactly sure how it works, but Axio had told me early on that it would make sure that the fabric of our dimension isn’t disrupted by too many people casually bending reality to their whims. In order to add an extra person into the Tenth Wave, I had to remove myself from the First Wave.”

  “Wait… so you are completely powerless now?” Mandragos asked curiously, though Christopher held up a hand and waved it side to side in a 'sort of' gesture.

  “The changes to my stats have not been lost, I still have the level I reached and all the stat points that I distributed, but I can’t equip gear from the game any longer, nor do I have access to any of my actual powers,” he explained. “I can still hit things hard, but without my body’s increased resistances from my powerset, it hurts like hell to do.”

  “That does explain why we have not seen you in this last week then, but it doesn’t exactly explain why Axio’s search for you is in vain,” Brightburst said before she considered it for a moment, reaching up and tapping at her chin. “Unless that is the point…”

  Mandragos looked over at her with a raised brow before looking back to Christopher. “What is the point? I believe I may have missed something.”

  “This is all just my best guess, so take it as that, but I believe that Axio is still searching for me because he believes that if he can find me, he can make me unlock the Key in his system so that he can continue to make changes, which is why I haven’t left this room in over a week now,” Christopher explained, the smile becoming just a bit wider. Loophole hadn't been the first person that had died or nearly died because of his actions, but it had just been that step too far that had made him break and use the Administration Key. He couldn't change that now, even if he wanted to, and it was an action he was going to have to live with, just as he was going to have to live with everything that had come from that decision. He was still incredibly angry due to the destruction and death that had been caused by Axio's search. and while it was inexcusable to say that death in any amount was fine, especially since he had risked everything for one random guy, Christopher was positive that letting Axio get his hands back on the Key would be far worse for the world. “And as long as he’s looking for me, that means that he isn’t looking for where I actually hid the key now.”

  “Ah ha, very crafty mon ami,” Mandragos said with a chuckle. “And where exactly did you hide this rather important tool?”

  Christopher and Calypso briefly met eyes and she nodded in encouragement. He had only revealed this to her in the hour before the others had shown up and it had certainly explained a lot to her, but she knew that the others needed to know, just to be able to make sure there were extra defenses in place just in case Axio did discover Christopher’s deception.

  Christopher reached out and slid a folder he had been keeping directly in front of him across the table, letting the two open it up to show the various information that he had collected so far.

  “That poor boy… does he know the responsibility you have dropped on his shoulders?” Brightburst asked as Mandragos opened the folder for them to both see. There was only a single picture accompanying the data and it should have been more than obvious to the two of them with the direction the conversation had taken, but seeing the picture of Loophole, his fists raised in a fighting pose put it all into context.

  “No, he doesn’t, and until we find a way to actually harness the Key to fix things, I think it’s better that we keep it that way,” Christopher said. “I attached the code to his P.A.I., though I had to do it in a rush which may have had some unintended consequences, but as long as he’s not aware that it is there and no one leaks it, it should be safe. Now… I’m open to suggestions on what we can try next.”

  Happy Monday! If you're enjoying the story, don't forget to leave a Rate, Review, or Comment!

  So last week I announced we were moving to a noon posting time because of how my schedule had adjusted recently. Unfortunately I think I have to just do a bit of nixing on my "guaranteed" time of posting for the time being due to some extra responsibilities I am currently working with. With that said, posts will still be Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, it will just be a bit more sporadic on the timing based on when I can do my final edit pass of the chapters before posting.

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